Using Hawthorn Process Colours
We've been stocking Hawthorn Stay Open Inks for 6 years now! These inks are oil based inks and work beautifully for relief printing. We have a fantastic range of colours including the process range. Process colours are inks specially formulated to create a full spectrum of colours when mixed. There is a Process Yellow, Process Cyan (Blue) and Process Magenta (Red). We stock the process range of many of our inks, particularly Speedball Screen Printing Inks and Caligo Safe Wash Relief Inks.
As well as being mixed, process colours can be printed on top of one another to create secondary colours. Yellow over red will create orange, yellow over blue will produce green and red over blue will produce purple. All three over one another will produce brown. By using just three layers of ink you can produce seven colours. You can experiment with transparency to achieve the best results.
We did a little experiment to show you the new Hawthorn process colours layered up. We mixed each colour with about 50% of the Transparent Hawthorn ink. In order to see the colours through one another you need to roll a thin layer of the inks onto the block.
Our three circles were printed with Process Cyan, Process Magenta and finally Process Yellow, all mixed 50:50 with Transparent. You can see the secondary and tertiary colours where the circles have overlapped. These were printed wet on wet but ordinarily we would wait for each layer to dry before printing the next.
The process colours produce a full range of colours when mixed. We produced three colour blends with our roller to show the spectrum of colours when using
just two of the process inks.
Process Yellow to Process Cyan:
Process Yellow to Process Magenta:
Process Magenta to Process Cyan:
To mix a pillar box red add a little yellow to magenta, to mix a turquoise blue add a little yellow to cyan. To make colours more ‘dirty’ add the complementary colour – add red to make greens more natural and orange to subdue blues. Watch this space for more blog posts on colour mixing with process colours!
Our full range of Hawthorn Inks can be viewed here!